I'll agree with a previous poster - slashdot, digg, have pretty much dropped off my reading habits - HN, NYT, and techcrunch (and sporadically groklaw and salon.com) are now my web distractions. Not every article can be about erlang.
To regurgitate an old adage I heard from a Dungeon Master: "It's not the game that's fun, it's the players." We're here to share links and talk about stuff, not to "post" and "comment", blind and deaf, into the void. As long as we all like one another, the site is good. When we attract a group of people we don't like as much, and those people attract people we don't like at all, then the site will suck, because those people won't be sharing and talking about the same things we want to share and talk about.
Personally, I like seeing marijuana dosage turning into a matter of engineering.